


Tessellate

by PeopleCoveredInFish



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Incredibly Self-Indulgent, M/M, Philosophy, Resolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 21:25:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3624795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeopleCoveredInFish/pseuds/PeopleCoveredInFish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He first meets him in Philosophy and Western Literature, chair kicked back and white loafer dangling from the toes of his right foot, and Kougami nearly laughs because the lazy smartass thing has always been <em>his</em> shtick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tessellate

 

> And if this is my punishment, then I want my crime to fit.
> 
> \- "Slow Poison," The Bravery

He first meets him in Philosophy and Western Literature, chair kicked back and white loafer dangling from the toes of his right foot, and Kougami nearly laughs because the lazy smartass thing has always been _his_ shtick.

It takes him five more seconds and the specific tilt of the desk to realize his mistake—the other student is not so much lazy as cat-like, muscles taut and poised to strike despite the absence of any discernible threat, pen moving across his copy of _2666_ in slow strokes. He acknowledges Kougami’s gaze with a slow arc of a smile. There’s something, Kougami thinks suddenly, of the nuclear in it.

He sits next to Gino and likes to think he’s forgotten about the stranger when class begins eight minutes later.

“Makishima Shougo,” he says, for introductions, “I’m currently interested in social epistemology, German idealism, narratology, anarchist theory, and, of course, the Foucauldian dispositif.”

“Do you think he washes his hair,” whispers Kougami to Gino, who pretends to be offended, pushing his glasses up his nose with a bit too much vigor for sincerity.

The introductions wind around the room, mostly populated by students who ‘enjoy philosophy’ or ‘needed to fulfill a core requirement.’ “Kougami Shinya,” he says, at his turn, “At present, I’m concerned with 20th century French philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotics, phenomenology, and the question of consciousness.”

He ignores Gino’s mouthed exclamation (“Since _when_?”) and raises an eyebrow in Makishima’s direction. The man continues to look serene, though Kougami thinks he detects an undertone of pleasure. Or irritation. It’s difficult to tell.

Fully expecting the class to continue without incident, he returns his gaze to his own notebook, and is writing the date in the top margin of the next blank page when he hears that voice again. “Professor, if I may…” the politeness of his words don’t mask the twist of his smile now, “why have you included trigger warnings on the syllabus?”

The professor tilts his head. “I wouldn’t call them trigger warnings per se, Makishima-san. I have prefaced the content of the course itself with a general disclaimer that certain elements of the readings may be upsetting to some students and that they should see a university counselor if necessary.”

Makishima’s smile widens. “But sir, some might argue that you’re medicalizing the classroom and buying into neoliberal discourses of individuation.”

Kougami feels a nerve starting to pulse in his forehead. He looks to one side. Gino is beginning to pale slightly. “Aren’t you being dismissive of people,” says Kougami, “who have been, I don’t know, _traumatized_?"

“I think that’s a vast oversimplification, Kougami-san,” replies Makishima, without breaking his calm, “especially as we know from psychoanalysis that trauma doesn’t produce homogenous effects, that is to say, trauma resists facile categorization. It is impossible to determine who might be affected by any potential ‘trigger’”—here he uses air quotes—“and thus impossible to predict trauma response.”

Kougami laughs, tries to make eye contact with a few of the other students—Can you believe this guy?—but no one will look at him. Gino is fiddling with the edges of his notepaper, eyes and expression almost completely obscured by his hair. “This is ridiculous,” says Kougami, “no one’s talking about blanket protections except for you. The professor clearly stated he’s only using warnings on certain materials, and the classroom isn’t going to be medicalized because students will be treated outside, in counseling. Tell me, do you also think trigger warnings constitute censorship?”

“Alright,” says the professor, “that’s enough, it’s time to—”

“Yes, I would,” exclaims Makishima, “mainly in the sense that they—”

“Bullshit,” laughs Kougami, and that’s when they get kicked out of class.

They’re walking down the hallway, touting books and papers and shoulder bags. “Kougami Shinya.”

Kougami grits his teeth. “What.”

“Your passion suits you. It would be wise to rethink your position.”

He takes in the loose formal shirt, half-tucked in, the dove-gray capri pants, the potentially fatal collarbones. The pile of books and papers ready to swerve out from under his arm; the distant, imperious attitude carved into that face, the golden eyes that seem to hold prophecy at their core.

Kougami walks away without saying anything, feeling those eyes dig into his back like ice.

“He sounds great,” Kagari says later, when they’re all hanging out under the big tree outside the student union, “tell me again how much of his shirt was untucked.”

Kougami elbows him in the ribs and he coughs on the apple he’s holding, before shrugging and starting to peel it with a pocket knife. Tsunemori shakes her head and smooths out her skirt, pulling her physics textbook out of her bag. “It sounds like what he said has some merit to it, but—”

“Woah, there,” says Kougami.

“But!” She holds up a finger, “There’s a reason some professors use trigger warnings. They were originally instituted in social justice organizing, from the bottom up. Translating that to the classroom can be difficult, I imagine, but I hardly think they’re useless.”

“Speaking of useless,” Kougami starts, “Gino, you could’ve backed me any time, man.”

Gino, who is transcribing notes from his notebook to his laptop, frowns slightly. “You were doing just fine on your own, by all appearances.”

“I got kicked out of class!”

“And whose fault was that, Shinya-kun?”

Karanomori, still in scrubs from her rounds, plops down next to the rest of them, joined by Kunizuka, who wastes no time in dragging her guitar out of its case.

The apple peel lengthens in Kagari’s hands, twisting into itself and dragging along the grass. Kagari is humming a vastly different tune from what Kunizuka’s playing, and he’s either a master at contrapuntal rhythm or has no sense of it, but when the man with the glowing eyes steps out of the student union he shuts up. “Shit, guys, that’s him, that’s the guy.”

“What guy,” says Kunizuka, monotone, pausing in her cover of Garbage to play with the end of Kagari’s apple peel.

“That’s my comp. sci. TA. I’m literally going to die. Tell my mother I loved a 40 year old hot Korean man.”

The group turns to size him up. “Really,” says Tsunemori.

Following him, a familiar flash of white hair—

“Fuck, hide me.”

“Kougami?”

“It’s him. Makishima.”

“Kou-chan, you’re 175 centimeters tall, how exactly are we supposed to hide you?”

Before they get a chance to try anything, Makishima sees their group, which falls instantly silent. His eyes seek out Kougami, who stares back, unblinking.

Makishima nods.

Kougami continues to stare and does not move to nod back.

Makishima appears to take the hint because he turns to the Korean and they pass the group without another attempt at communication, silent or otherwise.

“He didn’t notice me,” says Kagari, mournfully, sweeping his hand down to impale the apple with his pocketknife.

“You’re a freshman,” says Kunizuka, comfortable in her position as a second-year, like the rest of them, “you’re lucky if other _freshmen_ notice you.”

“Makishima-san has a mullet.”

It’s about as close to harsh as Tsunemori gets, generally, and Kougami smiles. Sometimes pointing out the obvious is indictment enough. She returns to her physics homework, content in her aspersion.

The conversation begins to shift in a more familiar direction—Kagari teasing Gino, wielding the apple-studded knife for emphasis—and Kougami doesn’t spend any more time thinking about Makishima Shougo.

They don’t get kicked out of class again, but it’s a near thing; treading on the ends of everyone’s patience as they chase each other through two weeks’ worth of _Robinson Crusoe_ and _A Scanner Darkly_ , stopping to rest, always, on Foucault and Bentham. Gino isn’t forgiving Kougami for being first in the class—it would be Makishima, Kougami reasons with no little annoyance, had he actually bothered to turn in anything for their first written assignment, choosing instead to tell their professor that he had been spending most of his time organizing actions for the anarchist collective and thus hadn’t had a chance to put his thoughts to paper.

The first major party of the semester is that weekend. Off-campus, but they pack into Karanomori’s bright red Toyota and follow Kunizuka’s directions to someone’s parents’ mansion in Azabu, primed for hot coeds and expensive liquor.

They arrive rather unfashionably on time, but the noise level increases as more guests arrive. Soon, Kougami is forced to cease muttering wisecracks to Gino when he realizes that the latter nods at everything whether or not he can hear it. Tsunemori, who is looking cute in light-blue evening wear, is enthusiastically drawn into conversation with a haughty-sounding freshman girl he doesn’t know. Kunizuka and Karanomori retreat into their own little corner, and Kagari links arms with Gino and drags him, not screaming but looking very much like he wants to, into the height of the crowd.

Kougami grabs a whiskey and soda and makes his way down the hall. The house, while cavernous, is swarming with people, and he walks until he can hear the sound of his feet on the marble floor.

After a minute of blissful silence, during which he’s lit up a cigarette from his pocket supply, the sound of soft laughter drifts toward him and around a further corner comes Kagari’s TA, commiserating with a female student who wears her long hair with a regal bearing. Suddenly embarrassed to be in their proximity for reasons he doesn’t quite understand but that he’s sure Kagari would find hilarious, he opens the nearest door and ducks into the room.

The first thing he notices is the fireplace, heaped with fresh wood and blazing bright. The second is Makishima Shougo.

“Oh,” says Kougami, hand back on the doorknob, “hello.”

“Hello, Kougami Shinya.”

It’s annoying, this form of hailing him, like he has the full weight of Kougami’s name on his tongue. There’s a book keeping him company this evening, as usual, and his hair hangs limp over one shoulder. Kougami is leaving, he is moving his feet, he is asking, “What are you reading?”

Makishima does not smile. “A novel. _A Tale for the Time Being_. The poststructuralist influence is quite visible, and I’m intrigued by the implications of narrativistic autocannibalism.”

Kougami takes a drag from his cigarette, and, what the hell, offers it to Makishima, who refuses with a slight shake of the head. “Vegan.”

“What?”

“I prefer to consume healthful foods and substances.”

“You know, most vegans smoke like chimneys.”

“Is that so?”

The tone of his voice brightens with what Kougami thinks might be slight amusement. “I’m surprised they haven’t kicked you out of the philosophy department, for being a nonsmoker.”

It’s the first time he’s heard Makishima laugh. To call it musical would be an overstatement, but it bears a certain lilt. Not that he wants to hear it again, or anything.

“I’m also Comparative Literature,” says Makishima, “double major. You?”

“Criminal Justice,” says Kougami.

“I see.”

“Disappointed?”

His face is wrought with it. Unbelievable.

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t expect more from you than to become a dog of the police force.”

“You don’t think the system can be reformed?”

Kougami sits down on the other side of the sofa. “You’ve read _Discipline and Punish_ ,” says Makishima, “What do you think?”

“I think it’s easy to get caught up in idealism.”

Makishima juts his chin forward a bit at that. “Idealism? Who’s the idealist? It’s clear that prison abolition is the only possible solution.”

“You would read abolitionism in Foucault?”

“It is becoming clear that I see his findings as applicable to our larger existence beyond the classroom, whereas you do not.”

Kougami laughs, mainly so that he won’t punch him. “I don’t know where you get the idea that I don’t incorporate Foucauldian discursive theory into my daily life, but—”

“The subject is produced through repetition, consistency developed through the apparatus of the prison system—”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“Really? It seems to me that if you _did_ know it, you’re blatantly ignoring it.”

Kougami nods, smile plastered to his face. “Right. Okay. It was nice talking to you.”

He starts to stand up. And Makishima says, “Let’s take another example: _History of Sexuality: Volume One_.”

Kougami is ready to leave. He doesn’t move. “Go ahead.”

“The incorporation of regular confession into Catholic doctrine after the Council of Trent. Gradually, this mode of unloading became a discursive construct that produced normative sexuality.”

“What’s your point?”

He’s fully back on the couch, and has he sat closer to Makishima, or did Makishima move when he wasn’t looking?

“I think I’ll have a taste of that cigarette after all.”

Kougami shrugs, shoulders rolling like his heart isn’t rocking against its casing, hands the cigarette over, doesn’t flinch where their fingers touch. Makishima inhales like an old pro, closing his eyes on the drag like he’s missed it in his bloodstream.

“You’re such a liar.”

“Hmm,” says Makishima, contemplative, “want it back?”

Kougami moves through the next few seconds asymptotically, never thinking to reach him, but Makishima leans forward and there’s smoke in Kougami’s mouth; he chases it, hands come up to move across Makishima’s jaw, into his hair. The cigarette falls, harmless, onto marble.

They shift into greed. Makishima bites Kougami’s lower lip, hard, until he can taste his own blood, his pulse thrumming with it. “You’re disgusting,” says Kougami, climbing fully into his lap.

“Heavy,” complains Makishima.

“You like it.”

Makishima hums into his mouth, twists his head to suck sharp little marks into his neck. Kougami’s breath stutters in the chamber of his throat. He thinks wildly, illogically, about the phrase ‘car accident’ and whether such damage could really emerge from anything other than the purposeful. He’s just sliding his hand down the front of Makishima’s linen trousers when the door opens.

They break apart, panting, painted with lust, squinting at the sudden light that illuminates the shape of someone in the doorway.

“Oh,” says Ginoza Nobuchika, twelve shades of red, “s-sorry...Kougami? Oh my god.”

“Hey, Gino.”

Makishima is definitely smirking, one hand still rubbing circles on Kougami’s thigh until the latter slaps it away. “Okay! See you later,” Gino squeaks, closing the door behind him with an indiscrete harrideness.

There’s a momentary pause before Kougami says, “Let’s get out of here.”

Makishima raises an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that you no longer desired my company.”

“Are you kidding me? You seduce me with discourse theory, you damn well better follow through. Though, just so we’re clear, this doesn’t mean I like you.”

“Just so we’re clear.”

Makishima’s smile is unnerving, as usual. To be more specific, Kougami thinks it might be displacing his tendons. “How’d you get here?”

“Bike.”

“Really? Sweet, let’s go.”

Five minutes later, after leaving the room and passing a throng of people--through which he can spot Kagari, who appears to be animatedly cornering his Teaching Assistant--it becomes adamantly clear that Makishima was referring to a fixed-gear bicycle.

“I can’t ride this.”

“It’s not a bicycle built for two, I’ll grant you that.”

“That’s really not what I meant.”

As it turns out, Makishima has friends—Kougami tries not to shudder—with access to a car. “I’d ask my own friends,” says Kougami, “but, well, you saw Gino.”

“Yes,” says Makishima, “will he be alright, do you think?”

Their return to the party’s epicenter disappoints Kagari, as he stands to lose his prey, but he quickly brightens upon noticing the state of Kougami’s neck and lower lip and their sordid connection to one Makishima Shougo. “Get in a fight?”

“You should see the other guy,” says Kougami.

“I’ll bet.”

The friend with a car, it turns out, is Oryo Rikako, the pretty girl Kougami had seen with Choe Gusung, and after they rescue the latter from Kagari’s clutches it’s an easy trip across the room to retrieve her.

She’s leaning against a wall when they find her, sketching the scene in a little artist’s notebook, drawing out the shadows with a charcoal-tipped pencil. “I only pay attention to the girls,” she tells Kougami when they’re on their way to her car, a sleek Audi. “They’re the only real beauty in a place like this.”

Kougami looks behind them, at brick and marble, and thinks he might understand.

Choe sits up front with Oryo. “Kagari’s friend,” he had said, with a nod of acknowledgement. “I don’t date students, you know.”

Kougami laughs. “That’s not stopping him from trying, is it?”

“It would seem not. He is, I must admit, charming in his own particular way.”

There’s a light smile in his voice. Oryo puts on the Killers. “So,” says Kougami, when the moment has passed, “how’d you two ever meet this freak?”

The two up front exchange glances. “Business,” says Oryo.

“Something I’d be better off not knowing about, I expect.”

Makishima is buckled into the window seat, looking small and white and harmless, and Kougami chuckles.

Not so harmless when they’re through Makishima’s dorm room door, up against which he shoves Kougami the moment it closes. “No roommate?”

He bites out the question between kisses as frenzied as the blood moving right under his skin.

“Touma usually goes home weekends,” is the breathless reply, “do you want to kneel down?”

“Excuse me?”

The thing is, he very much does. He’s not sure how exactly Makishima could tell.

"I will permit it," he elaborates, and Kougami would punch him if he could only resist the treacherous pull of his own muscle and sinew; down, down.

He drops to his knees.

Makishima tilts his head back the moment Kougami takes him into his mouth; looking at the expanse of throat bare and open above him. His focus drifts from the unyielding floor pressing against his joints to the weight of Makishima on his tongue to the uncomfortable tightness of his own trousers. He moves to rectify the situation.

“No,” says Makishima, “don’t.”

Kougami thinks to ignore the prat and do it anyway, but something in him is sewn up into Makishima’s command. He rests his hands in fists on the ground, filtering his technique through a matrix of what he thinks might make Makishima lose even a stitch of that steady control.

Nothing works. Makishima’s breath is light, even; the curve of his lips the only hint that he’s even enjoying this. But, moments later, Makishima says, “enough,” and it’s just the kind of quiet that Kougami thinks he might detect something, anything undone.

Of course it’s Kougami who staggers to his knees as though he’d been punched; Kougami who wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and rasps, “what do you want?”

“I would like very much to have you on the bed,” says Makishima, tone light, as though they’re discussing something innocuous, perhaps the beneficial varieties of green tea, rather than intimacy. Was this intimacy?

Makishima’s bed leans against the category of spartan, unadorned and plain save its comfortable mattress. “This isn’t school issue,” says Kougami, stepping out of his trousers, “is it?”

“I only sleep three or four hours a night,” is the reply, broken by a particularly driven kiss, “I greatly prefer that they are comfortable. On your back is fine.”

Kougami moves to lie on the bed. “Do you have, uh…”

“Lubricant? Yes.”

“That too, but I meant a condom.”

“Oh,” says Makishima, “surely that’s not necessary.”

Kougami sits up. “Are you fucking _kidding_ me.”

Makishima looks puzzled. It doesn’t suit him. “I prefer to abide by risk. Anything else is contrived.”

“Safe sex is not _contrived_ , you fucking...of course you would think that, I don’t know what I expected.”

“You mean, of course, _safer_ sex,” says Makishima, “as there is no such thing as safe sex.”

“I’m leaving.”

Kougami is beginning to shrug on his shirt when Makishima says, “If it’s that important to you, I can make an exception.”

“Forget it.”

Kougami’s clothes in place, he barely restrains himself from slamming Makishima’s door in deference to the late hour, and in doing so, catches the full brunt of the latter’s “Goodbye, Kougami Shinya.”

Gino is not in when he returns to his dorm, a circumstance that he would normally find strange but is, in this moment, quite welcome as he would like nothing better than to fall asleep without any questions and just forget this whole thing ever happened.

That doesn’t mean he’s above a little teasing when he wakes up the next morning, still heavy with exhaustion, to Gino reading aloud from his chemistry notes in preparation for the quiz they have on Monday. “Keep it down, Casanova.”

“What? That’s. How did...please don’t tell anyone!”

Bull’s eye. “Gino, I was joking, did you _really_? With who?”

Gino looks around—as though anyone would be eavesdropping in their own dorm room—and whispers, “Sasayama Mitsuru.”

Kougami gapes. “You’re kidding. You were getting it on with one of the hottest guys on campus and I was stuck with this _beanpole_ —”

“Kougami, you didn’t go home with him.”

“I did, a little.”

And he doesn’t hear the end of it, not then and not the next day either, walking to class, don’t you have any self-respect, he’s completely amoral, not to mention the diseases you could’ve caught.

He thinks he’s prepared to see him in class, thinks he’s ready for the awkwardness, but nothing has prepared him for having to look at Makishima Shougo for two and a half hours without some small, twisted part of him still _wanting_ the bastard.

He leaves class early that day. Just picks up his books and takes off, that not-quite-smirk ironed onto his cerebral cortex.

It’s not two minutes before he’s followed, Makishima slinking up beside him in the hallway. “You know,” he says, “it’s amazing what a little Deleuze can add to a classroom discussion when it’s not strictly needed.”

“You got yourself kicked out of class,” says Kougami. 

Makishima hums, and Kougami thinks about lighting up right there in the humanities building, passing the cigarette between the two of them until it’s down to the filter. He settles for kissing him, right there in the hallway, sharp and bitter, the passing students giving them uncomfortable looks.

“I really don’t like you,” Kougami affirms, dragging him into the single-occupancy bathroom down the hall.

“Yes,” says Makishima.

They’re bare against each other and Kougami moves, stroking them together, and Makishima’s not out of breath, exactly, but there’s something about the way his eyes flutter closed that has Kougami’s blood roaring.

When he finishes, it’s to Makishima saying his name, to the surety of recognition.

Is this intimacy?

**Author's Note:**

> The trigger warnings debate is partially based on real conversations I've heard at university panels and conferences. Believe it or not, the incorporation of trigger warnings is a hot topic there. 
> 
> Almost everything Makishima says in this fic is something I can imagine a fellow graduate student in my program saying in class, with a little added snootiness.


End file.
